Underwater photography

Dust spots are an unfortunate fact of life when shooting with a DSLR. Thankfully, Lightroom has tools that help to remove ‘dust bunnies’ from your images. However, dust is not the only enemy, especially for underwater photographers. We also have to contend with backscatter.

Original image, with backscatter

In the (rather ordinary) image of a nudibranch above, we can clearly see lots of spots and speckles. These spots are not dust spots, they are backscatter – the light from my strobes hitting some of the tiny particles suspended in the water, reflecting the light back into the camera

Hopefully, if you use Lightroom (and you really should be as it is a great all-in-one image editing and management package) then you already know about the spot healing brush (Shortcut Q)? As the name suggests, this is the tool to use if you are trying to clone out or heal parts of an image, maybe due to dust spots, backscatter, or even a piece of rubbish spoiling a pristine beach (although it would be better to actually remove the offending item before taking the photo)

Lightroom’s visualise spots option selected

Whilst working on this spotty image I remembered an additional option that is often overlooked when using the healing brush. Visualise spots (Shortcut A, when the clone brush is activated – or use the tickbox that is highlighted in red in the above image) presents a very basic black and white image, where dust spots show up as white specks on a black background, making them glaringly obvious.

As can be seen in the image above, finding the blemishes is much easier when the image is in such a contrasty black and white format.

Visualise spots set to maximum

The strength of this negative style image can be adjusted simply by moving the slider, highlighted in red in the above image. This helps to find the smaller specks that were not so obvious with a lower setting. It is down to you as to how far you go with spot removal.

I hope this post helps you with the thankless task that is dust removal.

According to the font of all internet knowledge, Wikipedia, abstracts are “a visual language of shape, form, colour and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world”.

They can be a get out of jail free card, when your chosen subject/situation fails. However, I feel the abstract is much maligned, and should be treated as a subject in it’s own right.

Below are 2 abstracts, one of which was planned, the other was more spontaneous.

Vertical blur

I went out to shoot bluebells, however I was around a week early, so didn’t get the full carpet of blue I was hoping for – The Bluebells are nearly ready

Wandering around Nymans wood, I came across some trees that looked just right for playing with vertical blur – reasonably straight, reasonably close together, and not very well lit.

I shut the aperture down to f/29 to reduce the light entering the camera

This gave me a shutter speed of 0.8 seconds

To go slower would have needed a neutral density filter

Shutter button was pressed whilst slowly moving the camera up, at various speeds

Out of the 30 or so exposures, only this one came out to my satisfaction.

Whilst it still shows woodland, it is abstract enough to make one look closely at the image as it is not immediately apparent.

Vertical panning on trees

Pattern

This was a planned shot, I had seen this subject on a previous dive, and the underwater photography group I was a member of had ‘Patterns’ as a theme in an upcoming monthly competition, so when we revisited the site I did so equipped to take this image.

60mm macro lens

Twin stobes pulled in tight and on low power

f/22 for depth of field

Tube worm pattern

The spiralling patterns and appearance of feathers are actually from a tube worm, a filter feeder found in oceans all over the world.

By shooting close up and parallel to the radiola (feeding arms) there is little to show it is a tube worm, and unless one is a diver or biologist, it is not apparent what the subject actually is.

Throwback Thursday is a social media phenomenon, where users post an old image of themselves. Rather than subject you to countless images of an even younger me, I have decided that each Thursday I am going to subject you to an older image of mine, and how the image came about.

Throwback Thursday is a social media phenomenon, where users post an old image of themselves. Rather than subject you to countless images of an even younger me, I have decided that each Thursday I am going to subject you to an older image of mine, and how the image came about.

Blenny shot with macro wet lens

This little blenny was one of the first subjects I turned to when I got a macro wet lens for my underwater camera setup.

Why a blenny? As long as I didn’t totally invade his (or her!) personal space, it allowed me to make a nice close approach, and by staying very still between shots, it became quite inquisitive and would approach the lens quite closely. He may well have seen his own reaction, and being quite territorial decided to see who the ‘other’ blenny was.

Shot using my first underwater camera setup, an Olympus C5000Z in the Oly housing, with a single epoque strobe, and my recently added macro wet lens.

The biggest improvement to make to this, would be having both eyes visible, and the head looking directly into the camera. This would have given the image much more impact.

As a beginner underwater photographer, I was very pleased with how it turned out anyway, learning to use additional wet lenses (both wide angle and macro) really opened up many more options for my underwater photos.

This is a scheduled post, as I am in Swaziland and South Africa until 7th March, and will probably have no internet access. If you do comment, please don’t think I am ignoring you by not replying!

Throwback Thursday is a social media phenomenon, where users post an old image of themselves. Rather than subject you to countless images of an even younger me, I have decided that each Thursday I am going to subject you to an older image of mine, and how the image came about.

Red Coral at 47m in Lanzarote

47m is a fair way down underwater, yet the strong sun and clear water mean there is still plenty of light at this depth in Lanzarote. There is not a lot of Red Coral however, as it is quite prized for making in to Jewellery.

May 2007 – This photo was taken on an Olympus C5000 compact camera, it cost me £100 on Ebay, and was in the Olympus housing, which had been discontinued, so that cost me the paltry sum of £50. I had a single, second hand Epoque strobe.

Why so much second hand or discontinued gear? As a new underwater photographer, I didn’t want to be spending several thousand pounds housing my Nikon D70. I also simply couldn’t afford anything better at the time, spending my dive instructor wages mostly on beer!

I cropped the image to a square to remove a distracting area of bare rock. To retake this image, I would go for a wide angle accessory lens, which would let me get much closer, and make the coral ‘pop’ out from the background.

Technically and artistically it could be better, but I was working with the most basic of equipment, so feel reasonably pleased with how it turned out.